Project: Water Watch Wisconsin

Mercury taints the fish. Nitrates, pesticides and endocrine disruptors are seeping into private well water. Trout streams are running dry. In this series, the Center is examining the many threats to Wisconsin’s water supply and water quality.

Erik Daily / La Crosse Tribune

A combine in Trempealeau County. Millions of acres of Upper Midwest grassland — which leaches little nitrogen into aquifers — have been converted to nitrogen-hungry corn, soy and other crop fields since 2008.

Major projects in Water Watch Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, a state whose very name evokes lakes, rivers and abundant water, hundreds of thousands of people may consume drinking water tainted with at least one contaminant. Nearly half the private wells are unsafe, one study found.

Across central Wisconsin, in a region known as the Central Sands, residents have watched water levels in lakes and small streams drop for years. In a state with about 15,000 lakes and more than a quadrillion gallons of groundwater, it is hard to believe that water could ever be in short supply. Experts say, however, that the burgeoning number of so-called high-capacity wells is drawing down some ground and surface water.

The Capital Times and Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism proudly present Murky Waters, a four-part series examining threats to the quality of the Madison area’s spectacular lakes, and ambitious new efforts that seek to improve them. Researchers around the world are watching our lakes in hopes of adapting these lessons to troubled bodies of water in other areas.

The city of Milwaukee, with more than 70,000 lead service lines, has taken several steps in the past year to lower residents’ exposure to lead in drinking water, but activists say the city has not done enough.

Nine months after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warned against flushing water systems before testing for lead, the state Department of Natural Resources has not yet passed that advice on to public water systems in Wisconsin.